Other Women

by Lisa Alther

  Caroline looked at her with surprise, wondering why Hannah would think she might want to. Then it came back to her in a rush, the times she phoned from school for rides home when she was sick, to have maids and secretaries reply that everyone was out doing good. The times she phoned Jackson at Mass General for advice on the boys’ health or for an errand on the way home, to be told he was in surgery. The times she reached out for David Michael in bed, to find he’d gone to Clea. And Diana? Who knew what she was up to? Courting Suzanne one minute and coming on to Caroline the next. She announced last night that she was staying in Poughkeepsie after Christmas to meet Suzanne in New York City for New Year’s Eve, the first they wouldn’t be spending together since they became lovers.

  “Thanks,” she said to Hannah in a choked voice. “Nobody’s ever done something like that for me before.” Her hand fluttered on the couch, wanting to reach for a Kleenex from the box on the chest. She pulled the hand back to her side. Her fingertips stroked the tweed cushion cover.

  “It sounds as though you have surrounded yourself with people who haven’t valued you properly.” It took a real leap of the imagination to call someone as doggedly determined to please as Caroline a “taker.” Hannah noted the near-lunge for a Kleenex, pleased self-pity had appeared on the scene. The battlements must be tottering.

  Caroline struggled with Hannah’s remark. What had Caroline said to convey the impression people hadn’t treated her properly? She’d led a privileged life. What had Hannah seen in those photos?

  “You didn’t pick your parents,” Hannah replied to Caroline’s look of confusion, “but you’ve picked everybody since.”

  Caroline stood up abruptly, feeling like a wimp. “I picked you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, and it was a smart choice, too,” said Hannah. Caroline unloaded cardboard boxes of the boys’ outgrown clothing and L. L. Bean boots from the back of her Subaru, as the boys raced to the corner drugstore to squander their allowances, a luxury country living didn’t afford. Her mother had asked for stuff for a Boat People Relief Fund rummage sale. Caroline carried the boxes into the empty garage. There were two large oil stains on the concrete floor where the cars were usually parked. Her parents had evidently gone to their offices despite her arrival. But it had always been understood in their family that disaster had priority. Vacations had been postponed, Brownie Flying Up ceremonies missed, as her father went to jail to post bond, as her mother tracked down a runaway. It went without saying that clients’ needs came first, because their own family was so fortunate. Her parents were good people. She resented Hannah’s skepticism. How could Hannah feel so free to pass judgment on people she didn’t even know?

  As she stacked boxes, Caroline reflected that her father had always brought things into this house, whereas her mother had always taken them back out again. Their marriage was a perfectly balanced ecosystem. He’d had clients who could get anything wholesale. One managed a salvage store in Dorchester that sold the contents of wrecked trucks and trains. The beige wall-to-wall carpeting through the house had survived a thirty-five vehicle pileup on Route 128. Whenever her father locked the keys in his car, he’d phone a client he’d gotten off a breaking and entering charge. Every fall they’d driven to Maine to gather bushels of potatoes too small for harvesting by the machines. On weekends they’d go to a fish market at Boston Harbor. In front were trays of fish under a sign reading “Catch of the Day.” They’d buy the limper, smellier catch of yesterday out back. On the way home they’d stop at the Haymarket for unsold vegetables at reduced prices.

  His forebears came to Boston from a farm on the Bay of Dingle during the potato famine. He put himself through BU Law School during the Depression by loading freighters and delivering laundry. He met Caroline’s mother at a mixer at Wellesley College. She used to talk regretfully of the other young men who’d pursued her at Wellesley. Though what she wanted that he’d failed to deliver had never been clear. Caroline’s mother’s father, the Anglican priest, reared his daughter to a life of service. As did her mother’s mother, who ran sales at the Shaker Heights church with the finesse of a casino croupier. Here in this rambling wreck of a house on Walnut Street in Brookline Village, Caroline’s family lived alongside those who needed service. Apparently Caroline’s mother’s notion of service was more genteel. You served, but you retreated at night to your Shaker Heights comforts.

  Caroline walked out into the driveway and inspected the huge Victorian structure with its peeling white paint, on its street of similarly dilapidated houses. Exterior woodwork had fallen off the turrets and from under the eaves throughout her childhood, and hadn’t been replaced, so the house looked still under construction, a hundred years in the making, like a Gothic cathedral. The evergreens out front were rust-colored from salt spray from the street, and the grass had been trampled by passing schoolchildren. There were patches of dirty snow where the house cast shadows. Her father had grown up down the street with nine brothers and sisters, children of an Irishman with a minor position at the municipal housing authority. Their mother worked as an aide at Beth Israel, which was where Caroline first got the idea of becoming a nurse. When Caroline was sick, her grandmother would stop by in her white shoes, uniform dress, and hairnet. Caroline liked getting sick because her grandmother would rub her shoulders with alcohol and bring her meals on trays. Also she got to stay in bed all day instead of following Howard and Tommy around the neighborhood, rescuing them from falls into manholes and rides with strangers. She used to be terrified something awful would happen to them while she was in charge.

  Entering the house, Caroline was glad for a few moments alone. She looked at the stairwell, where she hanged poor Howard’s teddy bear. He’d gone to Penn State and joined the boxing team. It was probably she whom he was pulverizing in the ring each match. He wouldn’t be home for Christmas. He was still in Chad in connection with the famine. Tommy was with the Public Health Service on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, and wouldn’t be home either.

  As she crossed the Route 128 carpet, she looked around the living room. The shelves and tables were devoid of the personal objects other people crammed their houses with. Her parents were ascetics, didn’t clutter up their lives with the insignificant, focused all their attention on important issues like disaster relief. It was admirable. But this house was so different from the ones she’d lived in since. Jackson’s neo-Tudor place had been a new bride’s wet dream—every appliance and decorator touch imaginable. David Michael’s Somerville commune had been its own kind of masterpiece—auto seats as couches, curtains of American flags liberated from government flagpoles, silk-screened posters about freeing this and saying no to that on every bare surface, glasses made from wine bottles, utensils stolen from Waldorf’s cafeteria at Harvard Square. Diana and she tended toward the rose-covered cottage motif—hooked rugs, fresh-baked bread, and laundry on the line. Each style was distinctive, unlike this living room, which could have been a motel lobby.

  Her father walked in the front door, heavy-set and florid-faced, with auburn hair like Jason’s, gone to yellow-gray at the temples. He had a scar across his forehead above one eyebrow, from a bayonet wound when he’d fallen on a forced march as a Japanese POW. His tie was an inch wide. As a teenager, Caroline used to be humiliated by his ties and lapels. Since he bought everything on sale, when width was fashionable he was buying narrow ones, and vice versa. He’d advance on Filene’s Basement like a soldier on an enemy trench, emerging with marked-down factory seconds. “It’s fine,” he’d insist, hunching a shoulder as his wife inspected a new jacket with appalled disbelief. “You just have to hold one shoulder higher than the other.”

  “Hello there, darling!” He hugged her awkwardly. The boys burst in, mouths stuffed with gum, hands full of Star Wars cards. “Why, who do we have here?” demanded her father, shaking the boys’ hands as they juggled Star Wars cards. “How was your trip, darling?”

  “Fine, thanks, Dad. Uneventful.”

  “Sorry no
one was here. I had to go to Dorchester. And your mother had an emergency. How about you three going with me to Filene’s to pick out presents for the secretaries?”

  The crowds on the MTA were daunting after the New Hampshire woods. The boys stuck close to Caroline’s side, and grabbed her hands as they fought their way through writhing ranks of half-dressed women trying on blouses in the aisles of Filene’s Basement.

  Her father decided on Chanel No. 5 for the secretaries. As Caroline helped him take bottles from a damaged carton, she was inundated with the scent. Her mother had always worn it. Caroline,

  Howard, and Tommy used to gather around her as she dressed for work. Whoever had been best behaved got to fasten her stockings to her garters. Caroline’s fingers twitched recalling the pleasure of fitting the silk stocking over the garter button and sliding both into the wire fastener. Meanwhile, her mother dabbed herself with Chanel No. 5. And Caroline gently ran her fingers over the ridges of pelvic bone that distended her mother’s silk slip. Breasts and bones, that was what you grew when you became a woman. They never had a clear idea what her work was. She talked about orphans shivering on street corners whenever Caroline or her siblings whined about anything. Maureen used to read them “The Little Match Girl,” and Caroline got it into her head that her mother went around to street corners handing out matches for orphans to sell.

  “Do you think they’ll like this all right?” her father asked as the saleslady rang up the Chanel No. 5.

  Caroline looked up at him from where she squatted by the battered carton handing him bottles. She wasn’t accustomed to his asking her advice. “Mother loves it. So do I. I’m sure they will too.” She studied his ruddy, jowly face. Hannah implied he caused her pain. But she recalled him in terms of his absence. He was hardly ever home. And when he was, he was on the phone, or reading depositions, or lying in bed moaning with colitis. She couldn’t remember their ever having a disagreement, or even a conversation.

  Washington Street was jammed with holiday shoppers who moved from window to window outside Filene’s and Jordan Marsh. Caroline, her father, and the boys halted before a display in which mechanical mice in red bow ties scurried through presents under a huge Christmas tree, as an alarmed mother in a nightgown threw up her hands time after time. Caroline sniffed the sample of Chanel No. 5 on her wrist and thought about her five senses. The more she entangled them with another person, the more rapidly a bond turned into bondage. As long as she merely yearned with her eyes, as she had at Jackson in his white lab coat and tie in the corridors of Mass General, she was okay. She had entertained fantasies about what his skin would feel like, but they stayed inside her fevered brain. Actually talk to a person and detachment became more difficult. Snatches of conversation recurred to you when you weren’t prepared. When your sense of smell became involved, your troubles really began. Everywhere you went, you picked up hints of the person’s cologne or aftershave, which triggered memories of the face or voice. Lately she’d become aware of Brian Stone’s English Leather. This wasn’t a good sign. To touch the person was to feel the slack go out of the chain, as when a wrecker is about to tow your car to the junkyard. And God help you if your tongue began to insist on tasting the person’s sweat and saliva. When all five senses were fully engaged with those of the other person, you were done for. The two sets of senses began to spin their own tangled webs of intrigue, with no regard for the best interests of those originally employing them.

  As they were carried along by the crowd to a second display window in which harnessed reindeer did a softshoe on someone’s rooftop, Caroline reflected that that was why this celibacy shit was so difficult. It was like drug withdrawal. Diana was at her mother’s in Poughkeepsie. She and Caroline had never spent a Christmas together, and now they probably never would. It hadn’t seemed worth ruining everyone else’s Christmas over. If you were black or crippled, at least your family still loved you. But if you were homosexual, you went it alone, as despised by your family as by the rest of society. They created you in their crucible, then loathed you for turning out as you’d been programmed. Maybe that was why there was a note of such desperation to her and Diana’s perplexing relationship. Each other was all they had.

  But of course now Diana had Suzanne any way she wanted her. They were meeting in New York for New Year’s. Caroline tried to decide if they’d check into a hotel. It was none of her business anymore, but it still felt like her business. When Brian asked her out for New Year’s Eve, she accepted. And Diana raged around the cabin like Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  “Why are you acting like this?” Caroline asked. “I thought you wanted us to date other people.”

  “So who’s annoyed?” snarled Diana. “Other people doesn’t mean men,” she added from the next room.

  In the first flush of new love, she brought Diana to Brookline, thinking her parents would be relieved to know she’d finally found happiness. Her mother, tall and angular, eyed Diana with tight-lipped, narrow-eyed disapproval and spent the weekend at her office. Her father chatted with them uneasily about abortion rights, then slipped out to his office, leaving them with the Vietnamese maid who’d fled the collapse of Saigon. She spoke no English except words like Lemon Pledge, Drano, and Comet. Trying to talk with her was like watching a TV commercial. “Need Vanish now,” she replied koanlike to every query.

  Walking home from the MTA, Caroline, her father, and the boys passed Caroline’s old high school, a sprawling red brick place where she’d been in a four-year anxiety state over the labels on her clothing. Rorkie, the leader of her crowd, decided who was in or out. Caroline imagined her marching up to an “out” and ripping the Villager labels off her blouse and sweater.

  “I went to school there,” she informed Jackie and Jason, who were balancing along the curbstone.

  “Were cars invented back then?” asked Jason.

  Caroline’s mother was lying on the couch in a wool suit with her shoes off. “Hello, dear, how nice to see you,” she murmured.

  “Hello, Mother.” Caroline bent and kissed her forehead, smelling Chanel No. 5. Her hair, which Caroline remembered as silky chestnut, was mostly wiry gray now. Her mother had fine features and high cheekbones. Her blue eyes narrowed to make her seem suspicious and critical. Caroline recalled pleading when she was ten, “I’ll do anything you want, Mother, if only you’ll stop being angry.” And she replied, “But I’m not angry, dear.” Her mother had seemed breathtakingly glamorous to Caroline as a child. Sometimes people on the street would say, “You look just like your mother.” And her mother would reply, “I’ve never seen the resemblance myself.” Caroline would feel as though the cracks in the sidewalk had just yawned open.

  “How are you, Mother?” asked Caroline, realizing all of a sudden that Diana had those same fine features and high cheekbones, though not the silky chestnut hair. And when Diana’s eyes narrowed, it was with lust.

  “As well as could be expected, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering it’s Christmas, which is a depressing time of year.”

  “I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down until time for church,” said Caroline’s father, loosening his too-narrow tie.

  “Are you tired, dear?” asked Caroline’s mother.

  “I am a bit. I went to Dorchester to talk to the parents of a first offender this morning. And I was out this afternoon buying presents for the secretaries.”

  “I spent the day collecting clothes for a rummage sale.” She closed her eyes and rested her forearm on her forehead.

  “You must be tired too.” He rubbed the ridge of scar tissue above his eyebrow.

  “Oh no, not too bad,” she said wanly. “But you look tired, dear.”

  “Well, my bowel is tightening up.” He removed his jacket and hung it on the newel post.

  “Go have a rest. I’ll bring you some tea.”

  “No, you’re tired, dear. Let me bring you some tea.”

&nb
sp; Caroline had forgotten about the Great Exhaustion Sweepstakes. It had always been understood that those who spent their days relieving human suffering were more evolved and deserved to be waited on when they got home. But problems arose on the maid’s day off.

  “I’m not tired,” said Caroline wearily, hitching up her gray cords. “Why don’t you both lie down and I’ll make the tea?”

  “But you must be tired, dear,” said her mother, glancing up from the couch, “after your long drive. Why don’t you lie down and I’ll bring you some tea?”

  “But I’m not tired and I don’t want to lie down!”

  “I was just trying to be nice.”

  “I’m sorry. Please let me bring you some tea, Mother.”

  “No,” she said coolly, turning on her side with her back to Caroline. “I don’t want any tea.”

  Caroline’s skin crawled with anxiety. She restrained herself from begging to make tea and ushered the boys into the playroom so her parents could rest in peace, as she had Howard and Tommy so often all those years ago. But Jackie and Jason began playing Space Invaders, not medical missionary.

  As she brewed herself some tea in the kitchen, on the harvest gold stove that had survived a warehouse fire, she felt tightness in her shoulders. She shrugged a few times to loosen the muscles. Why was she so exhausted? Probably from all those shopping crowds.

  Sitting in a pew at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, as she had most Sundays of her life until she moved into David Michael’s Somerville commune, Caroline glanced at Jackie and Jason, who sat on either side of her, wearing blazers and ties and looking perplexed by the hocus-pocus going on around the altar as communion was readied. When she was married to Jackson, she went to this church alone because he was usually either at the hospital or on call. The boys had been christened here. But when she left Jackson, she also left the church, adopting David Michael’s scorn for anything organized, and discovering she enjoyed sleeping late on Sundays and waking to lovemaking and breakfast in bed.